Nils Johnson

    My work begins with culturally specific objects such as food, ritual materials, and vernacular forms. It examines what happens as their meanings shift, fragment, or disappear. I approach these objects not as fixed symbols, but as unstable carriers of meaning, shaped by context, repetition, and time.

    Influenced by a Geertzian understanding of culture as a system of inherited symbols, my paintings treat objects as texts. They are dense with meaning, but never fully legible. Rather than preserving or clarifying these meanings, I subject them to processes of distortion and degradation. Forms are repeated, softened, and restructured until they become only partially recognizable. What remains is a trace: something familiar, but no longer fully interpretable.

   
    This degradation reflects the way cultural knowledge itself changes. Meanings are not lost all at once, but erode gradually through translation, displacement, and reuse. Objects detach from their original contexts and circulate in new ones, where they are aestheticized, simplified, or misread. My work does not attempt to recover an “authentic” meaning, but instead dwells in this space of partial understanding.

    The visual language is informed in part by early image-recognition systems, where familiar forms were reconstructed as unstable approximations. I translate this logic into painting as a material process. Oil paint becomes a means of misrecognition: edges blur, patterns proliferate, and surfaces resist coherence.

    In recent works such as EFFACEMENT, this process extends beyond the painted image. Through repeated scanning and printing, the image is physically degraded until it collapses into noise. The object disappears entirely, leaving only the structure of its transformation. What is preserved is not the subject, but the record of its erosion.

    Across the work, degradation is not simply destruction. It is a condition through which meaning is continuously reconfigured and less fixed, less certain, and increasingly difficult to name.